Mo
Channel 4
Mad Men
BBC 4
The post-war years were littered with Labour heavyweights from the likes of Clement Atlee, Ernie Bevin, Nye Bevan and Herbert Morrison to Harold Wilson, Michael Foot, Jim Callaghan and Tony Crosland. All of them were political giants. But not so in more recent years, where you would be pushed to name more than a handful who will one day become the subject of fat biographies.
Mo Mowlam, however, is one notable exception. Her involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process alone would be sufficient to earn her a decent-sized paperback. In Mo, we caught a glimpse of various other reasons why she will always be considered a Labour heavyweight.
Julie Walters, supreme as ever and with a remarkable likeness, painted both a depressing and joyous portrait of the former Labour MP for Redcar. Much of it was centred on her time in Northern Ireland, where she tirelessly banged heads together while battling a cancerous brain tumour that saw her lose her hair and have to contend with appalling tabloid comments.
Anyone who ever met Mo will vouch for her flamboyance and forthright openness. She could drink most journalists under
the table. When she confronts Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams for their initial series of talks, she is met with open hostility. To their astonishment, she tears off her wig and tells them she needs a good scratch. “OK boys”, she says, “let’s start this meeting again – only this time with no cocks on the table.” It was an openness that the Sinn Feiners, as she liked to call them, came to appreciate. Not so the precious David Trimble (nor Peter Mandelson for that matter) who never seemed to be able to cope with her slightly vulgar behaviour. Yet it was that very laddishness that led Mowlam on a daring visit to the Maze to confront the Loyalists and win their respect.
There is no doubt that Mo played a decisive role in the Good Friday Peace Agreement. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Mandelson, as well as the Northern Ireland politicians, all need to be credited, but it was Mo’s ability to knock heads together and her bluntness that made her contribution so important. It’s hard to think of any other politician who could have done what she did. That she had more balls than the rest of the Cabinet put together might well be a fitting epitaph.
Mo attracted a record audience for a Channel 4 drama – evidence, if it was ever needed, of her ongoing popularity. It also proved that British television is still capable of producing fine drama, although perhaps not rivalling the likes of America’s multi award- winning Mad Men, now starting its third series.
A cross between Jane Austen and Richard Yates, Mad Men is currently the slickest drama on television and certainly comparable to epics such as The Wire, The Sopranos and The West Wing. With its stylish costumes, deliberately restrained pace and mix of sex, cocktails, cigarettes and power, it provides a glimpse into the private lives of the advertising moguls of 1960s Madison Avenue. Here we find the debonair Don Draper of the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency, Peggy Olson who has risen through the ranks from secretary to copywriter (now with her own office, no less), the privileged and ambitious accounts executive Pete Campbell and the icy Roger Sterling, son of the agency’s founder.
For sheer visual style, Mad Men is in a league of its own. Its nostalgia is at its most sugary portraying an America that Americans still hanker for – when John F Kennedy promised so much and space represented the new frontier. But, of course, behind the gloss is the reality: homophobia, anti-Semitism and adultery. And yet for all its lavishness, acclaim and Emmys, Mad Men has been shunted to BBC 4. Surely this is a scheduling error here for a drama that deserves a Sunday evening on BBC 2 at the very least.
Stephen Kelly
